Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

by Tony Horwitz

  “Six months, maybe three, who knows? Whatever the day, I don’t want to be around when it happens.”

  As it turned out, Abu Zayd was overly optimistic. Six weeks later, tanks rumbled through the streets of Khartoum and an army colonel crackled onto the airwaves to announce yet another change of government, Sudan’s thirtieth in thirty-three years.

  * * *

  Myra Potts had a lilting Welsh accent, a gimpy arthritic leg and the most ghastly occupation of anyone I’d ever met.

  “I go three times a week to the lepers’ colony outside town,” she said, sipping mango juice on the bougainvillea-splashed balcony of a private British club, “and dress the old people’s stumps.”

  She worked without pay, to pass the time while her engineer husband saw out his stint in Khartoum. “Of course, we can’t give the lepers back what they’ve lost,” she said. “When a finger or toe’s gone, it’s gone.” She paused as a servant deposited a tray of fish and chips on our table. “But at least we can keep them from getting gangrene.”

  I declined the offer of lunch but accepted an invitation to go on rounds with her the following day. This was, after all, what I’d chosen to report: the worst that the world’s worst city could deliver. It was also hard to shirk the offer when Myra’s twelve-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, pleaded to go as well. “One must show some pluck if one is to learn about the world,” the young girl said, devouring her fish. So joined by Myra, Elizabeth and her eleven-year-old brother, Thomas, I found myself in the back of a four-wheel-drive, bouncing out of Khartoum and into a wretched refugee camp called Miyo. The settlement’s residents were among the million refugees camped out in the capital: on the streets, in abandoned cars or in miserable shanty towns like this.

  “Children, I hope you’re taking this all in,” Myra said, as tall black women, their breasts no more than milkless folds of skin, held shriveled infants aloft in the morning sun, pleading for piasters. “I expect five-page essays from each of you tomorrow.”

  “Mother!”

  “Thomas, don’t be a twit about this. Stiff upper lip.”

  The lepers numbered about one hundred and lived at the edge of Miyo in straw-and-scrap-metal huts chinked with cow dung. They’d been there twenty years and had even nominated a “sheik” to make representations to aid agencies and the government. “Not that it helps much,” Myra said. “The state doesn’t want to know about them.” Whenever a leper went to the hospital, two others had to go along as porters, because orderlies refused to handle them.

  We parked in a narrow, unpaved alley, beside a dead goat. Men and women instantly began swarming around the jeep, thrusting their limbs through open windows. One man grasped at my arm with what remained of his hand: a shapeless paw, scaly and almost reptilian to the touch, with five raw ulcers revealing where his fingers had been. On Thomas’s side, the window was closed, and a man pressed his face to the glass; his nostrils were two tiny holes sunk deep into cheekbones so wasted that his eyes drooped level with his shrunken nose. A woman, noseless, toothless, poked her head through Myra’s window and tried to speak. A high-pitched “uh” sound was all she mustered. “Leprosy’s got her larynx,” Myra said matter-of-factly.

  The lepers stood in a disorderly queue as Myra introduced them, one at a time. When each one’s name was called, he or she held out a limb for a welcoming shake. Unsure what the etiquette was in such situations, I opted for a sort of soul-brother elbow grip, and Thomas and Elizabeth followed my lead.

  “Tony, you play nurse and I’ll play doctor,” Myra said, pressing a wad of gauze into my hand and shoving a stool in my direction. We had stooped inside a makeshift clinic of mud, and the lepers crowded in behind us for treatment. Thomas and Elizabeth stood against one wall, swatting flies.

  “Ladies first,” Myra said gaily, and though the lepers understood not a word of English, they were evidently accustomed to the routine. A woman who looked to be at least a hundred hobbled forward and offered her bare foot. According to Myra, the woman’s actual age was forty-two. One toe remained, bent at an improbable angle, and crooked nails still protruded from the nubby flesh where the other four toes had been. Her other foot was square and scaly, like an elephant’s hoof.

  “Oh dear,” Myra said, plopping both the woman’s feet onto my lap and digging into her “bag of tricks.” She pulled out scissors and cut off dead skin, then poked a gloved finger into an abscess near the woman’s heel. Her finger disappeared.

  “Still got that flippin’ hole, don’t you?” she said to the woman, who didn’t even flinch. “Got no nerves left, I guess. But dearie, clunking around will just make it worse.”

  As Myra cleaned and dressed wounds, she lectured absentmindedly on leprosy’s grim course through the flesh. Contrary to popular notion, extremities don’t just drop off like leaves from trees. Rather, the bones and tendons shrink and the skin recedes around them. Circulation weakens so that lepers usually can’t even blush. Then the nerve ends go, the lepers lose all feeling, and each time they pick up a burning pot, or walk on wasted toes, another body part crumbles away.

  “Eyes are a big problem,” Myra continued, inspecting a woman’s reddened irises. As the bridge of the nose collapses, the eyes sag so low that the lids no longer close, even in sleep. This leads to infections, and many of the lepers are not only crippled but blind as well.

  Ironically, leprosy is one of the world’s least contagious diseases, requiring years of constant skin contact to catch. And by the time it has reached the stage of eroding extremities—the point at which lepers have traditionally been packed off to colonies—the disease has usually burned itself out.

  For a time I managed to take this all in with scientific detachment, nodding dully as Myra probed gashes, stuffed gauze in gaping ulcers and studied infected toes, declaring, “No need to bother with this one. It’ll be gone on its own by next week.”

  But as the morning wore on, and the women gave way to the men, the heat and stench of putrid flesh began to close in. After visiting the Iran-Iraq front, I’d thought nothing could faze me. But a corpse, however disfigured, is past its pain; it is possible to distance yourself just a bit. It is quite another matter to confront humans whose flesh is still being ravaged almost as you watch. I found myself inadvertently wiggling my toes and scrunching my nose, a subconscious check to make sure everything was still attached.

  “Here’s a real beauty,” Myra said, thrusting an oozing stump directly in my face. The man looked as though he’d caught his hand in a combine, then left it to heal with the shredded bones and skin still clinging to his wrist. “Gangrene, I ’spect,” Myra said, depositing the man’s arm in my hand.

  I felt a sudden urge to flee from the hut, past the heaps of trash and mangy goats and into the clear desert air. The way was blocked by the next man in line, sitting crosslegged, picking with blunt fingers at a loose bit of scabrous, fly-ridden skin. The air was breathless, the walls began to swirl. And the problems of the world seemed suddenly too big for me to take in.

  “All done,” Myra said, clapping her hands. We’d been there two hours. The woman was a saint. As she gathered her gauze and scissors, I rushed into the alley and stepped straight into a fetid pool of open sewage. Two male lepers, squatting against the wall, broke out laughing, clapping their stumps together. The American is standing in shit! Their mirth was contagious and I stood there for a moment, knee-deep in gunk, gulping the foul air and chuckling along with them. It was the least I could do, lighten a leper’s day.

  * * *

  Back at the Acropole, after a long and miserably cold shower, I found myself standing in line for the telex beside a lanky American. The kinship was instantaneous. Clutching a notebook of cramped, illegible notes, he wore dusty khakis and the anxious expression of someone who’d spent too many hours like this, queued up to send messages on a broken telex with little hope of ever getting an answer.

  “Journalist?” I asked.


  “Uh-huh.”

  “Free-lance?

  “Second-stringer, sometimes third.”

  We exchanged names and inflated press credentials. Scott was just out of college, bumming around Africa until his free-lance earnings and intestines gave out. The journalism was really only a way of paying for the travel. Most of the time, he entered countries on tourist visas, then filed stories on the sly to cover his costs. It was an ingenious and improbable ruse—a tourist visa to the Sudan?—and I was happy to meet someone whose modus operandi was as half-baked as mine.

  “Got a story to file?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Me neither. Let’s blow it off and go catch some Khartoum nightlife.”

  Khartoum nightlife was a contradiction in terms—or so I’d assumed. There was an eleven-o’clock curfew, laxly enforced, but worrisome nonetheless; a trigger-happy teenager with an AK-47 can be dangerous, particularly when he’s awakened from deep slumber, in a city where coup plots are constantly rumored and not infrequently carried out. There was also the sad fact that six years before, in a fit of Islamic pique, Sudanese officials had hurled the city’s entire liquor supply into the Nile and announced the imposition of Islamic law: flogging for drinkers, severed right hands for thieves, hanging followed by crucifixion for particularly heinous crimes. Islamic law had been suspended some time before my visit, but the sentencings continued and there were still four hundred people on Amputation Row.

  “They’ve got moonshine here that moves like a butterfly and stings like a bee,” Scott said, mimicking Muhammad Ali.

  “Mmmm. Particularly after eighty lashes.”

  “That’s for Sudanese,” Scott said. “We only get forty. Anyway, the worst they’re likely to do is take all our money and deport us.”

  I was intrigued, and depressed by the alternative: my sixth consecutive night in the darkened hotel lobby, waiting for the telex to kick on. So we headed off into the night.

  Scott’s contact was a jack-of-all-trades named Monem: sometime money changer, sometime black marketeer and all times standing in front of the Acropole, waiting for Westerners to hustle. “You need driver’s license, I can fix that, too,” he said as we rode a taxi to the edge of town. I wondered what use I could possibly have for a Sudanense driver’s license, except as a novelty item.

  We climbed out in the middle of nowhere, a half-mile hike from our actual destination. “The taxi driver, maybe he is informer,” Monem explained. He led us through streets of brick dust and garbage and into a narrow alley running behind what looked like an abandoned tenement. “Maria,” he whispered into the dark. “It is Monem.” A tall black woman in a purple wrap came out of the building and motioned us wearily to the bar—a tree stump, an overturned crate, and a blown-out truck tire. Then she ducked inside, emerging a moment later with a plastic detergent bottle and a single filthy glass.

  “Araki very good for digestion,” Monem said, splashing clear liquid from the detergent bottle into the glass.

  “I bet it is,” Scott said. “Instant case of Mahdi’s Revenge.” He belted the araki down in a single gulp, then winced and flapped one arm, chickenlike. Monem filled the glass and handed it to me. It smelled, in equal parts, of rum and paint thinner. I took a tentative sip and felt the araki sear my chest.

  “Great stuff,” I gasped. “What’s in it?”

  Monem shrugged. “Dates, I think.” He downed two glassfuls. Scott laughed. “Eye of newt, and toe of frog,” he recited. “Wool of bat, and tongue of dog.” He downed another glass. I took a sip. Monem downed two glasses. “Maria,” he said, tapping the detergent bottle. “More araki.”

  During our second round, other drinkers wandered through the alley, almost invisible in the dark. One of them struck a match beneath his chin; it was Ali, he of the python skins. In Khartoum, low-life was a small, closed circle. “Life or dead, your choose,” I muttered. Scott giggled and the others smiled politely. Two strange white men laughing at strange, white men’s jokes.

  With each glass of araki, Monem’s English deteriorated and so did his mood. “Sudan no good,” he moaned. “Government no good. Money no good. Just bongo and araki. And for this, they send you to jail. Or worse.” He rose unsteadily to his feet and lurched inside to see if Maria would let him spend the night. Through the open door there was the dim glow of candlelight and five or six children huddled asleep on the floor. Monem returned a moment later, looking even more depressed.

  “She tell me I am no more good than a dog,” he said. We wandered back out into the street, past families sleeping on mats of cardboard in the open air. We paused to urinate against a wall.

  “In Sudan there is only drink, and—what you call this?” Monem asked, making a vomiting motion.

  “Puke,” I said.

  “Byook.”

  “Puke,” Scott corrected.

  “Buke.” Monem smiled and made the motion again. “Okay, Mr. Tony and Mr. Scott. You write in your papers that Monem, he buke on Sudan.”

  * * *

  There were no taxis on the main road back into town, so we stood waiting for cars with which to hitch a ride. After twenty minutes or so a rusted sedan pulled over to let us in. I climbed in front, beside an immaculately clad man in a starched white robe and a tall white turban.

  “I can only take you as far as the prison,” he said, in perfect, clipped English.

  The prison? Had he picked up the araki on my breath?

  “It is just a few miles from here,” the man continued. “I work the night shift as warden.”

  “Oh.” There was an awkward pause. “And how is it, working at the prison?”

  “Not so good now that Sharia is no longer enforced as it should be,” he said. “Sharia” was the Arabic word for Islamic law. “A man who drinks deserves the whip,” he added, “and a man who steals deserves the sword.”

  I resisted the urge to glance over my shoulder to check Monem’s expression. Buking, I suspected.

  “What were you doing back where I picked you up?” the warden asked. “It is a very bad part of town, you know.”

  “Really?”

  Scott snorted, inhaling a giggle. Then he blew his nose to keep from cracking up.

  “Do you mind if we get out at the corner just ahead?” I asked the driver. “I think we’ll walk it from here.”

  He seemed surprised. We were still some miles from the city center. But he pulled over and dropped us off in the dark. Monem watched carefully until the car’s lights disappeared in the distance, as if he expected the warden to return with a hooded swordsman in tow. “This Sharia is very bad,” he said, urinating in the dust, rather shakily. “I not want to give my right hand for Allah.”

  After a half hour’s wait, we managed to flag down another car, crammed with five men and reeking of bongo. As soon as we’d piled in, the driver took off in a cloud of dust, narrowly missing a huge cement block lying in the middle of the road. The driver laughed, gunned the engine, almost ran over a dog and burned rubber down the empty road into town.

  “Africa, I love it,” Scott sighed, relaxing in my lap. In the morning he was off for Tigre Province in Ethiopia, to tag along with a band of mountain guerrillas. “Tonight we drink, for tomorrow we may die,” he said, clasping my hand as I climbed out at the Acropole. He was staying aboard, just for the ride. The car roared off with the door still open, and I never saw Scott or Monem again.

  12

  SOUTHERN SUDAN

  Six Dinka Deep

  Khawajja (pl. khawajjat): A Persian word meaning notables or merchants. In the Sudan it is used for white foreigners.

  —BUKRA, INSHA‘ALLAH:

  A Look into Sudanese Culture

  As it turned out, Scott had found one of the surer escape routes from Khartoum. It was easier and probably safer to trek over the Ethiopian border with Tigrean rebels than it was to travel across Sudan by road or air. In a country one-third t
he size of the continental United States, there were only 800 miles of paved highway; a drive to El Obeid, just 250 miles from Khartoum, could take three days. Flying was worse. Sudan Air, the state-owned domestic carrier, was a sort of cistern in which all the chaos of the nation collected. Planes routinely skipped stops, made unplanned layovers of several days, left without passengers—or, most commonly, didn’t leave at all. Sudan Air’s pilots celebrated my arrival in Khartoum by joining almost every other work force in the city and going out on strike. The job stoppage was redundant; Sudan Air’s entire fleet was already grounded with maintenance problems.

  The only alternative was hitching a ride on one of the small Western-owned relief planes ferrying between Khartoum and the famine-stricken south. It took me ten minutes in the Acropole lobby to locate a flight and two days in dusty government offices to cajole and bribe a travel permit from Sudanese officials. The government didn’t want journalists reporting on the civil war, which pitted the entire Sudanese army against a ragtag band of bongo-smoking Dinka rebels. The war wasn’t much of a contest; the confederates were winning. The only effective weapon left to the government was scorching the rebels’ turf by refusing to send food to the beleaguered south and by arming Arab tribes, who promptly raided Dinka cattle and took Dinka refugees as slaves.

  “There’s not much milk of human kindness on either side,” said the UNICEF official who secured me a seat to Muglad, a town at the edge of the war zone.

  From what little intelligence I could gather in Khartoum, southern Sudan hardly seemed worth fighting for. Most of it was swamp, and the rest, in the words of a nineteenth-century Englishman, was “god-forsaken, dry-sucked, fly-blown wilderness . . . a howling waste of weed, mosquitoes, flies and fever.” Boarding the four-seat UNICEF cargo plane at dawn, I wrapped a mosquito net around enough bread, water and antibiotics to see me through a week in hell.